The British have done very well in the past at the Berlin film festival, with the Golden Bear prize going to Michael Winterbottom's In This World in 2003 and Paul Greengrass's Bloody Sunday the year before that. This year, however, we came home empty handed. David Mackenzie's movie Asylum, a version of Patrick McGrath's dark novel adapted by Patrick Marber, divided the critics and evidently didn't find favour with the festival jury, chaired by Roland Emmerich, the German-born Hollywood blockbuster supremo.

As it was, the Golden Bear winner had a British-born director in Mark Dornford-May. His triumphant movie was U-Carmen Ekhayelitsha, a reinvention of the 1875 Bizet opera, transplanted to a modern South African township, and sung in the Xhosa language. Carmensitha, played by Pauline Malefane, works in a factory and sings in the factory choir. When she stabs another woman in a brawl, a fateful love affair begins with an infatuated police officer, Sergeant Jongikhaya, played by Andile Tshoni. The festival jury found in the film a vivid, documentary-style shooting technique, in counterpoint to the passionate music. It intrigued festivalgoers, who could hardly credit that this endlessly revived opera could be made to look so fresh.

Given that we are commemorating 60 years since the horrors of the Holocaust were discovered, journalists in Berlin had thought the Golden Bear would go to one of the sombrely themed movies in competition. Lajos Koltai's Fateless was a moving story of Hungarian Jews deported to the camps from occupied Budapest, and two movies about the Rwandan nightmare - Hotel Rwanda and Sometimes in April - were respectfully received. But the winner on this theme was Sophie Scholl: The Last Days, which picked up the best director and best actress awards respectively for Marc Rothemund and Julia Jentsch as Scholl, the young woman executed for defying the Nazis by distributing rebellious leaflets.

My favourite movie at Berlin won the Jury Grand Prize. Changwei Gu's Peacock is a sad and beautiful family drama from China: a superb directorial debut from the former cinematographer of Fifth Generation vintage who has also worked for RobertAltman, Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige. In a little town in the 1970s, a family ekes out a hard existence in a cramped flat. The daughter (Jingchu Zhang) loathes her school and life and has no idea how to change things; she fantasises about joining the army after an encounter with a handsome paratrooper and tries "adopting" a kindly old fellow as her godfather because she hates her parents so much - an idea she abandons after the man's indignant children beat her up. Her brother (Li Feng), massively overweight and bullied at his job in a flour factory, is finally humiliated and denounced as a "pervert" for hanging about the girls' lavatory at school. Younger brother (Yulai Lu) is thrown out of the family home for making innocuous nude sketches in his school notebook. Things are altered by marriage, as each of the three children embarks on their own steep path in this world with a soulmate, of sorts; the tragicomedy of finding a spouse provides the film's most touching moments. It does not exactly offer a triumph of the human spirit, but it's a fine, intelligent piece of film-making.

Many will have been appalled at the garlands handed out to Tsai Ming-Liang's porn-musical fantasy, The Wayward Cloud. That got the Silver Bear for "outstanding artistic expression" and the Alfred Bauer prize for a film that "succeeds in taking the art of film in a new direction". A new direction? Some critics were outraged by what they saw as misogyny and flippancy in Tsai's movie, which is indeed a startling change of direction for a film-maker previously valued for subtlety. I wasn't sure what to make of Wayward Cloud, but its technical accomplishment commands attention of some sort.

For me, the big disappointment is that nothing went to the remarkable, strange film from the Russian master Aleksandr Sokurov, who returns to form with The Sun, his claustrophobic chamber piece about Emperor Hirohito in the last days of the second world war. The film is shot in gloom for the interiors and a bleached-out blankness for the outside scenes, as if the shock of defeat and nuclear catastrophe has leached all the colour and natural light from the world. It's a shame the Berlin jury could not have found a way to honour this daring, disturbing and gripping film.